Papers by Matt Smith

6 papers
Linguistic Knowledge and Transferability of Contextual Representations (N19-1)

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Challenge: Recent work has explored contextual word representations, which assign each word a vector that is a function of the entire input sequence.
Approach: They compare pretrained word representations with 16 diverse probing tasks to examine their transferability.
Outcome: The pretrained representations are successful across a diverse set of NLP tasks . the models are competitive with state-of-the-art models but fail on fine-grained tasks requiring fine-granular knowledge, the study finds .
Quoref: A Reading Comprehension Dataset with Questions Requiring Coreferential Reasoning (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing reading comprehension benchmarks do not contain complex coreferential phenomena . obtaining questions focused on such phenomena is difficult because of lexical cues .
Approach: They propose to use a crowdsourced dataset to examine the ability of models to resolve coreference among entities in Wikipedia paragraphs.
Outcome: The proposed model performs significantly worse than humans on the reading comprehension benchmark . paragraphs and other longer texts typically make multiple references to the same entities .
AnyMAL: An Efficient and Scalable Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Prior work on LLMs focused on models that combine text and one other modality, such as image encoders or proprietary models that are not open sourced.
Approach: They propose a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals and generates textual responses.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better on multimodal tasks than industry-leading models .
Evaluating Models’ Local Decision Boundaries via Contrast Sets (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization but are misleading when a dataset has systematic gaps.
Approach: They propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data.
Outcome: The proposed model performs significantly lower on contrast sets than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases.
Competency Problems: On Finding and Removing Artifacts in Language Data (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent work in NLP has documented dataset artifacts, bias, and spurious correlations . how to tell which features have spurious instead of legitimate correlations is typically left unspecified .
Approach: They propose a class of competency problems to formalize this notion into a classification . they show that realistic datasets will increasingly deviate from competency problems .
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to show that models are inappropriately affected by these less extreme biases.
A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing information-seeking question answering datasets do not perform well on answering these questions . existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not do well answering these tasks .
Approach: They present a dataset of 5049 questions over 1585 NLP papers . they use a question-seeking QA model that seeks information in the full text .
Outcome: The proposed dataset underperforms existing models on other QA tasks by 27 F1 points . the focus is on document-grounded, information-seeking QA .

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